Shibboleth and utf8

Administrators
1

Hi,

Although I am relatively new to Indico, I’ve seen it grow and mature through the years and I feel that it is now ready to be used by our University. I’ve installed the latest version, translated almost 60% to Greek and now I’m experimenting with Shibboleth.
It took me some time and testing, but I’ve managed to set it up.
The issue I’m facing now is the handling of UTF8 characters by shibboleth.py

See the screenshot for the new user creation screen:

image
image1083×405 22 KB

The format of the strings that are returned by our IdP is: “en_US;el_GR” for example “test;δοκιμή”
The Shibboleth.sso/Session display these strings properly and I suspect there is an issue how the handling is made from the Indico side.

I’ve seen a similar issue here, and the proposed ‘hack’ by @mastermarv solves my issue, so I believe that a proper patch should be applied to the file, to be used by all!

Kind regards,
Theodoros

2

To me that sounds like a case of shibboleth passing weirdly formatted data in a non-standard format… how is Indico supposed to know that it should split at ; and only take the first or second half?

Or is there any kind of standard indicating that Shibboleth can use such a format and it’s documented somewhere?

3

No the splitting of strings is to be handled by me! (although I think it’s pretty standard). The reason I posted the picture with both en_US and el_GR was to show you that the latin part is handled/displayed properly, while the non-latin part is not.

What I suggest is for Indico to officially handle UTF8 shibboleth responses, like mastermarv did with his patch!